A Christmas Gift? Life With Me

During work yesterday, I was searching the net for what started out to be graphic ideas for a project I was working on and ended up a wild foray into what ever got clicked on, I found this web site, Tippy Toes and Tantrums. She writes about her children and the amusing and frustrating things that happened throughout a normal day. The blog made me smile, it will for anyone with children, grandchildren or folks who wanted children. From a genealogy stand point I hope she prints all of these articles off and keeps them for her children and grandchildren. What a fabulous gift.

Her latest story is about trying to do the yearly Christmas photo to be sent to friends and relatives. I remember this as being a large process for my mother growing up. The card table came out along with the address book of names, stamps and assorted note paper. Cards were separated first into the ones that got personal notes included and those that were just signed and sent. Eventually she would separate them into bundles by location to drop off at the post office. There had to have been 250 cards sent each year.

Before the writing process could begin mom had to get THE photo. From her telling it one year, at the ripe age of 2 and a half, I had decided to be a bit creative through the process. My brother is 14 months older than I and from the looks of the pictures extremely stoic through the ordeal, I on the other hand had decided to sing, at the top of my lungs, swaying back and forth. I remember, for some odd reason being stood on the bed near a wall in a zip front footed sleeper in my brother’s room. When I looked up at the wall there was a flat wooden cow that was jumping over a flat wooden moon along with a cat and a fiddle. That was all it took, I broke into song.

She tried everything to no avail, dressed up, in sleepers, you name it, the one gal choir carried on. Dressed up and planted in matching elephant chairs, made by my grandfather to fit us just so. Either dad managed to snap between comic reactions or I had grown tired of entertaining but there I was, looking happy. She sent it off to be printed, hundreds of times and then she got it back. Someone at the print shop had scratched the negative before printing the shot. Each cute photo had a faint scratch straight across my smiling, not singing, face. This would not do.

Square one, with the Christmas cards waiting she tried one more time. One day dad came home for work, crawled on the floor with us in our ratty play clothes and took our picture. That was it, the one that would do, even if we did look a bit homeless in the attire in the shot. She had yet another Christmas card completion under her belt.

You can’t bring up that photo shoot today without my mother being reduced to a giggling mess. She tells me that every time she runs across that printed roll of snap shots she cracks up. If she really wanted people to know what life was like with me, she probably should have sent one of the ones of my grand performance.